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Archive for September, 2011

Happiness of easy MIDI programming with Scala didn’t last too long. Almost everything is fine with my pair of DaScratch controllers. I can switch the led’s and read the touch interfaces easily, but there is one small thing. The mode of round touch interface is switched by using MIDI system exclusive or sysex command. This is easy with javax.sound.midi in theory, but in OS X the sysex command doesn’t get transmitted.

This can be worked around by using mmj drivers. With mmj sending sysex messages from Scala console is a bliss. However, if there’s a pair of identical controllers just like I have, I can not access the second controller because of a bug in mmj.

So, I filed two bugs:

to Apple about sysex commands. I’ve got problem ID 10016703, but no response.

to Humatic about accessing two similar devices with mmj. Nils from Humatic responded very fast, but he didn’t promise fix soon.

Well, seems that my first project creating router for a pair of DaScratches is spinning off another project creating Java MIDI drivers for OS X.

As Scala console, Interactive Interpreter or REPL was one of my selling points for programming MIDI with Scala, I show what can be done with it. I do not show how to install Scala or how to access console.